Anyone unable to speak fluent English will be barred from a selection of jobs involving direct contact with the public.
NHS staff, police officers and council employees will be among the public sector workers required to have language skills that are equivalent to GCSE grade C or above.
Social workers, teaching staff and their assistants will also be affected. Staff already in the roles may be given time to improve their language skills.
Under the new rules, which are due to come into force in September, public sector managers will have to check that their prospective employees can “communic

More than a third of students graduating this summer have already secured a
job, accepting an offer before they took their finals, according to research.
It shows that the first cohort to pay £9,000-a-year tuition fees is more eager
to get started in careers than any set of students on record.
The survey of more than 18,000 final-year students from 30 UK universities was
conducted by High Fliers Research, the recruitment analyst, and provides the
first data on how the trebling of tuition fees has affected undergraduate
behaviour.
The fee rises prompted mass student prot

Top companies have become more elitist in the past decade by recruiting too many privately educated Oxbridge graduates with the “right” accent, a report says today.
Alan Milburn, the social mobility tsar, said that many required recruits to pass a “poshness test”, which systematically excluded bright working class candidates.
Senior directors interviewing candidates admitted that they were unlikely to have passed today’s recruitment tests because their firms had become so selective. Up to 70 per cent of job offers at leading firms last year were made to graduates who had been educated at sele

Apprenticeships are to be defined in law to stop employers from using the term
for short or sub-standard training programmes.
The Enterprise Bill, to be introduced in the autumn, will seek to protect
apprenticeships as a “brand” as the government tries to fulfil a manifesto
pledge to create three million of them by 2020. Employers trying to use the
term for lower quality courses will face legal action.
The exact definition has not yet been drafted but it will be based on current
quality controls which state that they must involve at least 12 months’
training. Police for